The symphony and the Book of David

Perhaps the strangest thing to come out of Montana since dental floss, former Metro columnist David Anthony Richelieu finally had a memorial service this morning. He died Sept. 7 of congestive heart failure at age 63. His massive body has already been cremated and the ashes sent back to his mom.

(Actually, dental floss and Montana were connected only in the fertile brain of Frank Zappa, who immortalized that state’s imaginary cash crop in the Mothers of Invention tune “Montana.” But I digress).

I can’t claim to have known David very well — our paths didn’t cross much — but I got the impression he would rather be doing the things he wrote about. He once conducted the symphony; legend has it he used to take the score of the piece being performed to concerts he was reviewing to make sure they were being played properly. And his columns on the TriParty improvements that transformed downtown in the early ’90s suggested he wished he were the one drawing the plans instead of criticizing them.

But the symphony’s start of a new season — the classical series opens this weekend; the Pops concerts began two weeks ago — reminds me of a recurring theme in David’s columns. Far from being a classical-music purist, he urged the chronically financially strapped orchestra to look to the pop-music world for ideas on expanding its audience. Some examples:

• “Few people around town even know the San Antonio Symphony recently unveiled its 1997-98 classical concert season,” he wrote in February, 1997. He floated an audacious idea — the return to fully staged opera featuring a big star, “say, a dramatic new production of Puccini’s ‘La Boheme’ whose cast includes — ahem — Madonna … She does sing in ‘Evita,’ after all.”

• In a 1994 column, after assailing classical-music reviews (“many are pompous academic exercises festooned with egotistical displays of jargon to impress a conductor, a guest soloist, friends or other critics”), he attacked the heart of the problem:

“As symphony audiences gray with America, few orchestras have learned to turn on the MTV/digital compact disc generation … An 80-piece orchestra can zap a crowd with more musical voltage than any rock group. But that means trying new technologies on new audiences in new settings.”

• Contrasting the excitement at a nearly sold-out Vicente Fernandez concert at HemisFair Arena in 1993 with the symphony’s plight — “struggling for survival presenting one of the most glorious pieces of music ever (Beethoven’s 9th) to about 4,500 people on two nights” at the Majestic — Richelieu suggested the orchestra should find a way to team up with the ranchera star.

I bring this all up because it doesn’t seem that much has changed. Still struggling financially, the symphony signed its latest contract Aug. 31, two weeks before the season started. The schedule doesn’t seem to have much audience-widening potential — the only thing that jumped out at me was the Pops program entitled “The Music of Led Zeppelin.” But that’s not until March.

We’d like to do the right thing over in Weekender Land and support the symphony, but we could use some help. In 2002, the season opened with hip-hop composer Daniel Bernard Roumain presenting the premiere of his “Human Songs and Stories for Orchestra, Narrator and the People,” with David Robinson as guest narrator. Now THAT’s more of what Richelieu had in mind.